What is line planning?

• ✓Line planning is a process, not a document: the line plan is its numeric record and the line board is its visual surface.
• ✓It sits after the financial plan and the open-to-buy envelope and before range and assortment planning and the buy; development runs inside it.
• ✓Merchandising owns it, planning owns the numbers, design owns newness and sourcing owns cost, minimums and capacity — write the split down per decision.
• ✓The option count is derived from the budget: a tier’s budget divided by the buy per option, rounded down, and checked against the ceiling supplier minimums set.
• ✓Its six stages are strategy, architecture, development, line reviews, lock and handoff; the line changes by swap after lock, not by addition.
• ✓The three recurring failures are too many options for the buy depth, unfunded newness, and a line locked after the cost moved.
• ✓The process holds across verticals, but what one option is and what bounds the count change — a delivery drop in apparel, a size run of pairs in footwear, a shade range in beauty, a container in home, a licensed window in toys.

What line planning decides

Every line planning process, whatever the vertical and whatever it is called, makes the same six decisions. They are made in this order because each one divides what the one before it set — and a team that makes them in another order usually discovers the conflict at the buy.

• Which categories, and what each is for. Not just the list — tops, bottoms, outerwear — but the role each category plays this season: the volume driver, the margin engine, the story, the opening price, the test. A category’s role decides how much of the budget it gets and how much risk it is allowed to carry, so it is settled before any option is counted.
• How many options each category carries. Breadth, counted in a stated unit — in apparel a style-colorway. The count is the hinge of the whole process: it is the number design develops to, the number sampling and costing are sized against, and the number that divides the budget into depth. See what counts as one option for why the unit has to be agreed first.
• The price architecture. How many price tiers, at which price points, with which spacing, and how the options and units split across them. The tier is the second axis of the line, because each tier carries a different depth and a different markup. See line architecture: good, better, best and price tiers.
• Newness against carryover. Which proven options return, and how many slots are left for new ones. Carryover arrives with known sell-through, known cost and shorter lead times; newness arrives with a story and no evidence. See balancing carryover and newness.
• When each option lands. Which delivery, drop or floor set each option belongs to, so every delivery merchandises on its own and the newness is not all in the last one. See planning drops on the line board.
• The targets the line has to hit. The sales and margin each category, tier and delivery owes, translated into the planned units, retail prices and target costs each counted slot has to carry. See costing the line to a margin target.

Notice what is not on the list: which specific styles. Line planning decides how many slots there are and what each slot has to be — its category, tier, delivery, flag, depth and cost — and development decides what fills them. The line is planned as a frame before it is designed as a collection, and the frame is what keeps a collection that design is proud of from being one the budget cannot buy.

That separation is also why line planning is not the same thing as design or as buying, though it involves both. Design proposes; buying commits; line planning is the stretch in between where proposals are tested against the money, the calendar and the factories before anything is committed, and where the answer to “can we add one more” is arithmetic rather than opinion.

Category roles: the first decision line planning makes

Before any option is counted, each category is given a job. The role decides how the category’s budget is divided — few options deep, or many options shallow — and how much newness it is allowed to carry. Two categories with the same budget and different roles should end up with very different line plans.

The names vary — some teams say core, fashion and seasonal; others say anchor, story and test — and a category can hold two roles at once, such as a volume driver whose top tier is also the margin engine. What matters is that the roles are written into the strategy, because an unstated role is decided at the line review by whoever argues hardest for their category.

The role also tells the hindsight what to read. A volume driver is judged on sell-through at depth and on how long its core sizes stayed in stock; a story category on whether the hero sold through at full price; a test on whether it produced a clear read in time to act on. Reading every category on the same measure punishes the test for being a test. The option-role read is set out in hindsighting the line, and the hero designation in hero style.

Where line planning sits in the season calendar

Line planning sits between the money and the product. Upstream of it is the top-down financial plan and the open-to-buy envelope; downstream of it are range and assortment planning and the buy. It inherits a budget and hands on a line.

Why it comes after the financial plan. The merchandise financial plan sets what each category has to sell, at what margin, with how much inventory, month by month. The open-to-buy turns that into what the category can receive — planned sales, plus planned markdowns, plus the planned end-of-period inventory, less the beginning inventory and what is already on order. Line planning divides that envelope. A line planned before the envelope exists is planned against appetite, and the buy is where appetite meets the budget.

Why it comes before range and assortment. Assortment planning decides where each locked option goes — which channels, clusters and doors — and how deep. It inherits the line’s breadth and cannot repair it: a line with too many options for its units can only be spread thin in a different pattern. The full case for that order is in line board vs assortment board, and building the assortment once the line is locked is in how to build a visual assortment board.

Why development runs inside it, not after it. Line planning does not finish when design starts drawing. The architecture is set first, development fills it, and the line reviews in between are where the two are reconciled — so in calendar terms line planning is long, opening before the first concept and closing at the lock. A team that treats line planning as a single meeting at the start of the season has a line plan, but no line planning: nothing checks the developing line against the frame until the buy does.

Why the hindsight is usually partial. Development lead times mean one season’s line is planned while an earlier season is still selling, so the hindsight available at the start is often early reads rather than full-season results. That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to plan which decisions wait for a later read — a carryover call on a late-selling option, say — and to put that read on the line review calendar. See hindsighting the line.

Who owns line planning: the RACI

Line planning is cross-functional by construction: the money sits with planning, the concepts with design, the costs and factories with sourcing, and the call with merchandising. The decisions that go wrong quietly are the ones nobody owned — a count that planning thought merchandising had signed, a cost sourcing thought design had accepted.

Read the table as a common split, not a standard. The letters move between companies — in a smaller brand one merchandiser may hold the planning role too, and in a wholesale-led business the sales lead may be consulted on every count. The value of writing a RACI down is that each decision has one accountable name before the season starts, not that it matches this one.

• Merchandising. Owns the line as a whole: the strategy, the category roles, the price architecture, and the final say on what is added, cut or swapped. Merchandising chairs the line reviews and signs the lock, and it is the function that has to say no to a good concept that the line cannot carry.
• Planning. Owns the numbers: the envelope by category, the option budgets by tier and delivery, depth, the minimum and margin checks, and the handoff to the buy. Planning’s job in a line review is to say what a change costs before it is agreed.
• Design. Owns concept direction and the newness that fills the counted slots, and proposes against the plan — often for more than it allows, which is evidence about where the season’s ideas are rather than an error. Design also owns the reserve list’s creative side: which concept replaces which slot if one falls out.
• Sourcing. Owns what the line will cost and whether it can be made: target costs, factory and mill minimums, capacity and lead times. Sourcing is the function that knows a cell is below minimum before the buy finds out, and the one whose confirmed quotes decide whether a locked margin is real.

Two more groups usually sign rather than build. Finance or leadership signs the financial envelope at the start and the lock at the end; and where the brand sells wholesale, sales or account management is consulted on the counts per delivery, because accounts need enough options to fill a floor set. The line review agenda and sign-off template carries a sign-off record with a line per function.

What goes into line planning

Five inputs feed line planning. Each one either sets how much the line can carry or limits how many ways it can be divided, and a missing input does not stop the process — it moves the decision it should have informed to somebody’s instinct.

• Financial targets. The category’s sales plan, margin target and open-to-buy for the season, by delivery. Whether the envelope is stated at cost or at retail varies by company; what matters is that every number in line planning uses the same basis, and that the margin target is stated as the initial markup the line has to be bought at.
• Hindsight of last season. Sell-through, margin and markdown read by option role, price tier and delivery, not just by category total. It decides which carryover earns a slot and which tier or delivery needs fewer options or more depth.
• Trend and concept direction. Design’s view of where the season is going — themes, silhouettes, colors, materials — with merchandising’s view of how much of it the customer will buy. It sets how many new slots the line needs, and where the story sits. See from mood board to assortment.
• Capacity and minimums. Factory minimums per option, mill minimums per fabric and color, factory capacity by month, and lead times; and the development team’s own capacity in concepts, samples and fittings. Minimums set a floor under depth and so a ceiling on the option count; lead times set how late a concept can enter. A shared fabric can let several options clear a mill minimum none would clear alone — see fabric platforming.
• Calendar and channels. How many deliveries, which channels, which exclusives, and what each channel needs — enough options per delivery to fill a wholesale floor set, enough newness per drop for a direct-to-consumer customer to come back.

What line planning produces

Line planning produces five things, and the last of them is the easiest to leave out. A line plan and a line board without a record of the decisions behind them cannot be changed safely after lock, because nobody can tell which counts were argued for and which were defaults.

The line plan and the line board are two views of one line. The plan says how many options each cell holds and what each owes; the board shows which styles and colors fill those slots and whether the result reads as a range. They only agree while they are counted in the same unit and edited as one record — a card cut at a line review that changes the board and not the count is how two copies of the line start to disagree. See how to build a line board for the board side.

The option counts by category and price tier are the output development is sized against: they set how many concepts design draws, how many samples are ordered and how many costings sourcing chases. The reserve list is the output that makes a locked line changeable without reopening it, and the line review record — every add, cut and swap with its reason — is the output next season’s hindsight reads first.

The six stages of line planning

Strategy and architecture set the frame, development and the line reviews fill and test it, and the lock and handoff commit it. Each stage has a different owner and a different failure, which is why it helps to name them separately even where a small team runs two at once.

What each line review is for

A common pattern is three reviews a season; some teams run two, some run one per category or per delivery. The number matters less than the rule that each review asks a different question, and the line moves less freely at each one. A team that asks the final review’s question at the early review locks too soon; one that asks the early review’s question at the final review reopens the strategy when the factories are waiting.

The early review is about the frame. Merchandising walks the strategy and the counted slots, planning shows that the frame sums to the envelope, and design shows first concepts against slots rather than as a collection. It is the cheapest review to change things at, because nothing has been sampled yet, and the easiest to skip, because there is not much to look at. Skipping it means the middle review has to argue about the strategy and the samples at the same time.

The middle review is about fit. The developed line goes up on the board and the plan sits beside it. Each cell is read for count against plan, each tier for price ladder gaps, each delivery for balance, and each costing against target. This is where the reserve list does its work: a concept that is better than a locked slot’s current occupant is swapped in by name, and a cell over its ceiling is cut back to it.

The final review is about commitment. The question is no longer whether the line is good but whether it can be bought as it stands — every cell at count, every slot flagged, every cost confirmed or explicitly open. The review ends with the lock and a list of what the lock releases: sampling for sales, fabric bookings, the assortment build, the line sheet. A final review that ends with “nearly there” has not locked anything.

From an open-to-buy envelope to a supportable option count

Every figure below is illustrative — not a benchmark, not drawn from any brand, and chosen so the arithmetic can be checked. The calculation is the one line planning makes at the architecture stage: how many options can this budget actually buy?

Take women’s woven tops in a hypothetical season. The open-to-buy envelope for the category is $240,000 at cost. Merchandising holds 10% back as an in-season reserve for reorders and chase — $24,000, a planning choice rather than a rule — which leaves $216,000 to plan the line against. The strategy splits it 40% Good, 40% Better and 20% Best: $86,400, $86,400 and $43,200.

Each tier has a retail price, a target cost and a planned depth — the units one option needs to carry its size run through the season. To keep the arithmetic legible, cost is 40% of retail in every tier, a 60% initial markup: Good at $45 retail and $18 cost, Better at $75 and $30, Best at $120 and $48. Planned depths are 400 units for a Good option, 300 for Better and 200 for Best.

The average buy per option is depth times unit cost: 400 × $18 = $7,200 for Good, 300 × $30 = $9,000 for Better, and 200 × $48 = $9,600 for Best. The supportable option count is the tier’s budget divided by that buy, rounded down — because a fraction of an option is a real option bought too thin.

Good divides exactly: $86,400 ÷ $7,200 = 12 options. Better does not: $86,400 ÷ $9,000 = 9.6, so the plan holds nine options, commits $81,000 and returns $5,400. Best gives $43,200 ÷ $9,600 = 4.5, so four options, $38,400 committed and $4,800 returned. The line supports 25 options — 12 Good, 9 Better and 4 Best — committing $205,800 of the $240,000, and the reserve grows to $24,000 + $5,400 + $4,800 = $34,200. The two figures sum back to the envelope: $205,800 + $34,200 = $240,000. In units, that is 4,800 + 2,700 + 800 = 8,300.

The supportable count is the plan. The ceiling is the limit. Suppose the illustrative factory minimums are 300 units per option in Good, 250 in Better and 150 in Best. At minimum depth the buy per option is 300 × $18 = $5,400, 250 × $30 = $7,500 and 150 × $48 = $7,200, so the same budgets can hold at most $86,400 ÷ $5,400 = 16 Good options, $86,400 ÷ $7,500 = 11.52, or 11, Better options, and $43,200 ÷ $7,200 = 6 Best options — 33 in all.

Now design brings 39 concepts: 15 Good, 15 Better and 9 Best. Spread over the same budgets, Good at 15 is $86,400 ÷ 15 = $5,760 per option, or 320 units at $18 — thinner than planned but above the 300 minimum. Better at 15 is $5,760 per option, or 192 units at $30, below the 250 minimum. Best at 9 is $43,200 ÷ 9 = $4,800 per option, or 100 units at $48, below the 150 minimum. Two of the three tiers cannot be bought at quoted cost at design’s count — each would need a surcharge, a shared platform or fewer options.

The reconciliation gives design one more Better option, funded by the $5,400 that rounding had sent to the reserve: ten Better options at $86,400 ÷ 10 = $8,640 each, or 288 units at $30, comfortably above the 250 minimum. Good stays at 12 and Best at four. The line becomes 26 options and 8,480 units — 4,800 + 2,880 + 800 — committing $86,400 + $86,400 + $38,400 = $211,200, with $24,000 + $4,800 = $28,800 in reserve; $211,200 + $28,800 = $240,000. The concepts that did not make the 26 go to the reserve list, each against the slot it would replace.

At full retail the reconciled line is worth 4,800 × $45 = $216,000 in Good, 2,880 × $75 = $216,000 in Better and 800 × $120 = $96,000 in Best — $528,000 in all — against $211,200 of cost, a blended initial markup of 60.0%.

Then, after the counts lock, the Best quotes come back at $54 instead of $48. Four Best options at 200 units now cost 800 × $54 = $43,200, which is $4,800 over the $38,400 committed — exactly the Best remainder still sitting in the reserve. Best’s markup falls to ($120 − $54) ÷ $120 = 55%, and the blend falls to ($528,000 − $216,000) ÷ $528,000, about 59.1%. Whether the line absorbs that or the margin does is a line planning decision, and it is one the process should make before the buy rather than discover at it: re-cost, re-tier, drop an option, or spend the reserve knowingly.

What line planning leaves for the season to decide

Line planning ends at the lock and the handoff, but a well-run process plans what it is deliberately leaving open. The decisions a line plan defers should be named, budgeted and dated, not simply left undecided.

• The reserve. In the example, $28,800 of the envelope was not committed at lock. It belongs to someone — usually planning, with merchandising’s sign-off — and it has a purpose: chase the options that read well, or absorb a cost move the line could not. A reserve with no owner is spent by the first request that reaches it.
• The read dates. Every test and every new option bought at shallow depth should carry the date its read is due and the decision it informs — chase, hold, or let it sell out. Without a date the read happens when someone remembers, which is usually after the reorder window has closed.
• The swaps. The reserve list is still live after lock. A concept can still replace a locked option in the same tier and delivery up to the point where fabric or production for the slot is committed, and the process should say where that point is for each delivery.
• The carryover calls. Some carryover decisions for the next season depend on how this season sells. Put them on the next season’s strategy agenda with the read they are waiting for, so they are made on evidence rather than on what was carried last time.

This is where line planning meets the in-season work of open-to-buy, allocation and markdown, which sit downstream and are covered on retail-plan.com. The line planning part is narrow but it matters: the line as locked, with its counts, flags, reserve and decision record, is the baseline everything in-season is read against.

Line planning vs line plan vs line board vs assortment planning

Four terms describe overlapping parts of the same season and are used loosely enough that a team can agree on a sentence and mean different things by it. Line planning is the process; the line plan and the line board are what it produces; assortment planning is what comes next.

Two more neighbours are worth separating. Merchandise financial planning sets the money — sales, margin and inventory by category and month, and from them the open-to-buy — and line planning works inside it: the financial plan says what a category has to earn, and line planning decides what the category will contain so that it can. Product development turns counted slots into styles, samples and costings, and runs inside line planning rather than after it. A team that calls all three “planning” will find each one assuming another has checked the numbers.

This page does not re-argue the artifacts. The line board against the line sheet and the line plan — including the wholesale document the others feed — is set out in line board vs line sheet vs line plan, and the line board against the assortment board in line board vs assortment board. The single terms are in the glossary: line plan, line board, line review and option count.

How line planning differs by vertical

The six stages hold in every vertical. What changes is what one option is, what paces the calendar, and what bounds the count.

• Apparel — by delivery drop. An option is a style-colorway carrying a size run, and the line is planned delivery by delivery, so each drop or floor set has to merchandise on its own with an anchor core and its share of newness. Fabric and trim minimums per color bound the count, and the carryover-against-newness split is decided per drop as well as per season. See planning drops on the line board.
• Footwear — model-year carryover and size-run cost. Every colorway commits a full size run of pairs, plus a width run where widths are offered, so an added colorway costs a run of inventory rather than one more card. Core models carry over for several model years, with colorway refreshes, while new lasts, molds and outsoles carry long lead times and tooling cost — so newness is planned in new bottoms as well as new colors, and prebooks read the line before production. See the footwear and accessories guide.
• Beauty — shade ranges and the launch calendar. An option is a shade within a franchise, and the shade range does the size curve’s work: a range that skips depths or undertones leaves customers with nothing to buy, and the gap never shows in sell-through. The launch calendar and retailer gondola resets set the windows, so a shade that misses a reset waits for the next one; testers consume units that never sell and are replaced on their period-after-opening, and the shelf life of sealed stock shortens the sell-down window. See the beauty and personal care guide.
• Home and furniture — long lead and floor sets. An option is a model in a finish, fabric or configuration, often with special-order options that widen the line without committing stock. Container minimums and ocean lead times fix the buy months ahead of the floor set, so the line locks earlier and changes by swap after it; landed cost moves with freight, so the margin check runs on landed cost; and core models carry for years, which makes newness a finish refresh shown at market and committed through dealer prebooks. See the home, outdoor and sporting goods guide.
• Toys — licensed windows and the gifting peak. An option is an item, sometimes with pack or case variants. Licensed items live inside their license windows, so their slots expire with the license and have to be planned against its dates; the line is weighted to the holiday gifting peak and to retailer commitments made well ahead of it; and every new item needs safety testing before it ships, which caps how late a concept can enter. See the toys, juvenile and jewelry guide.

The per-vertical option definitions and the bounds on the count, for ten verticals, are on how to build a line plan. The process question is the same everywhere: is the line counted in the unit the buy will be placed in, and does the budget carry that count at a depth the supplier will make?

Wholesale-led and direct-to-consumer line planning

The channel mix changes the calendar and the point at which demand first reads the line, more than it changes the process. A wholesale-led line is read by accounts before it is produced; a direct-to-consumer line is read by customers after it lands. A brand that sells through both has to plan for both clocks at once.

Wholesale-led. The line has to be locked in time to be shown at market and sold in at prebook, so the lock comes earlier and the line sheet is built from it. Prebooks then give the line its first demand read before production is committed, and options that fail to book become candidates to cut — which makes the post-prebook cut a planned stage of line planning, not a failure. Breadth per delivery is set by what an account needs to fill a floor set, so the count has a floor as well as a ceiling. See prebook and line sheet software.

Direct-to-consumer-led. The brand sets its own drop rhythm, so the calendar is paced by how often the customer needs a reason to come back, and newness is planned per drop. There is no prebook to read the line before production, so the first read is sell-through after launch — which puts more weight on hindsight, on testing newness at a shallow depth, and on keeping a chase reserve in the open-to-buy, as in the example above.

Both at once. Where the same line sells through both, the line is planned once and locked once, and channel exclusives are flagged as their own cells so they are not counted twice — once in the channel’s total and again in the category’s. The channel split itself belongs to assortment planning, downstream of the lock.

Where line planning fails

Three failures recur, and each is a mechanism rather than a lapse — they happen to careful teams, because each decision that produces them is defensible on its own. All three are visible in the arithmetic before they are visible in the season.

Too many options for the buy depth

Options arrive one good concept at a time — a colorway approved at a fitting, a capsule absorbed late, an exclusive granted to a channel — and each divides a fixed budget one more way. In the example above, design’s 39 concepts on the same money put two tiers below their factory minimums. The line looks richer on the board and is thinner in every door: size runs break early, options record as slow when the sizes customers wanted were simply gone, and the next hindsight blames the product. The counter is to plan from the budget down, state the ceiling per tier, and keep a reserve list so every addition names what it replaces.

Unfunded newness

Newness costs more than its slot. A new option needs concepts, samples, fittings and costings that carryover does not, and it needs enough depth to be a real test — an option bought at presentation minimum in a handful of doors cannot tell anyone whether it would have sold. When the strategy asks for more newness without funding the development calendar or the depth, the new options either arrive late, arrive thin, or push carryover out of slots it had earned. The counter is to state the newness as a count per tier and delivery at the strategy stage, so development capacity and depth are budgeted with it, and to read the newness rate rather than set it — see newness rate.

The line locked after the cost moved

Counts are signed on target costs; confirmed quotes come later. If the quotes move — a fabric price, a duty change, freight, a factory change — between the target and the lock, and nobody reruns the margin check, the line is locked on numbers it no longer meets. In the example, a $6 move on Best took the blend from 60.0% to about 59.1%. The fix is to lock counts and costs as two separate states, rerun the margin on confirmed quotes before the commercial lock, and decide explicitly what absorbs a miss. See costing the line to a margin target.

Three more show up often enough to name:

• Planning by category total. A category that sums can hide one tier that grew and another that emptied, or a delivery with no opening price. Plan and review by cell — category, tier and delivery — not by total.
• Two counting units. A plan agreed in styles and a board built in style-colorways disagree by the average number of colorways per style, and every downstream number inherits the gap. State the unit in the plan’s header.
• A lock with no owner. A line “agreed” at a review with no version, date or named owner is not locked; it is paused, and it will be edited by whoever touches it next.

Ten questions to ask before the line locks

A line is ready to lock when every one of these has an answer someone in the room is willing to sign. A question nobody can answer is a decision the buy will make by default.

1. Is the option count stated in one unit — style, style-colorway or SKU — and is the board counted in the same one?
2. Does every category, tier and delivery cell sum back to the open-to-buy envelope, with the reserve stated separately?
3. Is every cell at or below its ceiling, with headroom recorded for the cells planned close to it?
4. Does every price tier have options in every delivery where the customer expects to find it?
5. Is every slot flagged carryover or new, and is the newness funded with development capacity and a depth that can read as a test?
6. Does each delivery merchandise on its own, and is the newness spread across deliveries rather than gathered in the last one?
7. Has the margin check been run on units at retail against units at cost, on confirmed quotes where they exist — and which costs are still open?
8. Does every option clear its factory minimum, and every shared fabric its mill minimum?
9. Is the reserve list current, with each concept named against the slot it would replace?
10. Who owns the lock, what version and date does it carry, and what does it release downstream?

The line board checklist covers the board side of the same readiness test — required fields, category balance, color story, price architecture and option-count reconciliation.

Line planning when one person holds three roles

In a small brand the RACI collapses: the founder or head of product is merchandising, a designer or two is design, and planning is a spreadsheet one of them keeps. The process still has the same six stages, but the checks that cross-functional tension used to provide now have to be built in on purpose, because nobody in the room is paid to say the budget does not stretch.

• Write the frame before the concepts. When the person drawing the line also owns the budget, the frame is the only thing that argues back. Put the counts by tier and delivery on paper before the first sketch, and hold the line review against it.
• Get the minimums in early. A small brand’s units per option are closer to supplier minimums, so the ceiling bites sooner. Ask for minimums per option and per fabric before the architecture is set, not with the first quotes.
• Keep the reserve list anyway. It is the cheapest discipline in the process: a named list of concepts that did not fit, each against the slot it would replace, so a late idea becomes a swap rather than an addition.
• Lock with a date even if you lock alone. A version and a date on the line is what lets next season’s hindsight compare the line as planned with the line as bought.

Small lines are also where a spreadsheet and a wall are most clearly enough. The arithmetic in this guide fits on one sheet, and the board fits on one wall; the risk is not the tools but the absence of a second person to check the sums.

Running line planning on files, a wall or software

Line planning can be run on a spreadsheet and a wall of printed cards; every calculation on this page is spreadsheet arithmetic. The limit is not the medium but the number of copies: a plan in one file, a board on a wall and a cost sheet in a third have to be reconciled by hand after every review, and the reconciliation is where cuts get lost. If you are starting from files, the line plan workbook holds the counts, minimums and margin checks, the line board template holds the visual grid, and the line board checklist gets a board review-ready. For a category-level plan without tiers or drops, the line plan template on retail-plan.com is simpler. For what separates a board tied to the plan from a picture of it, see visual line planning software.

• How to build a line plan, step by step →
• Line board vs line sheet vs line plan →
• Line board vs assortment board →
• What is a line board? →
• How to build a range plan →
• How to run a line review →
• Locking the line: what sign-off commits →
• Costing the line to a margin target →
• Balancing carryover and newness on the line →
• Line plan (glossary) →
• Line plan workbook →
• Line plan vs assortment plan (retail-plan.com) →

Frequently asked questions

What is line planning?

Line planning is the process of deciding a season’s product line — its categories, option counts, price architecture, the split between newness and carryover, and the sales and margin targets the line has to hit — before development and buying commit to it. It starts from the financial plan and the open-to-buy, runs through development and a series of line reviews, and ends when the line is locked and handed to assortment planning and the buy.

What is the difference between line planning and a line plan?

Line planning is the process; the line plan is the document it produces. The process covers the strategy, the architecture, development, the line reviews, the lock and the handoff, and it involves merchandising, design, planning and sourcing. The line plan is the numeric record inside it: option counts by category, price tier and delivery, with the units, target costs and margin each cell carries. The line board is the same counted line shown as image-first cards.

Where does line planning sit in the season calendar?

After the top-down financial plan and the open-to-buy envelope, and before range and assortment planning and the buy. The financial plan sets what each category has to sell and earn; line planning decides what the line contains within that budget; assortment planning decides where each locked option goes and how deep; the buy turns planned units into purchase orders. Development runs inside line planning, between the line reviews.

Who is responsible for line planning?

Merchandising usually owns the process and signs the line, planning owns the numbers, design owns the concepts and newness, and sourcing owns target costs, minimums and capacity. Finance or leadership typically signs the financial envelope at the start and the lock at the end. The split varies between companies, so the useful step is to write the responsibilities down for each decision, not to copy a standard chart.

How do you work out how many options a line can support?

Divide each price tier’s share of the open-to-buy by the average buy per option, which is the planned depth times the unit cost, and round down. In the illustrative example on this page, a Good tier with $86,400 at cost and a buy per option of 400 units at $18, or $7,200, supports 12 options. Then check the result against the ceiling that factory minimums set: the same $86,400 at a 300-unit minimum supports no more than 16.

What are the most common line planning mistakes?

Three recur. Too many options for the buy depth, so options are planned below the minimum a supplier will make at quoted cost. Unfunded newness, where new concepts are added without a budget for development, sampling and the depth a test needs. And a line locked after the cost moved, where the counts are signed on target costs that confirmed quotes no longer meet, so the margin is lost before the season starts.

What does line planning produce?

Five outputs: the line plan document, with counts, tiers, deliveries, units, target costs and margin by cell; the line board, which shows the same counted slots as image-first cards; the option counts by category and price tier that development, sampling and costing are sized against; a reserve list of concepts that did not fit, each named against the slot it would replace; and the line review record and the lock, with every add, cut and swap, its reason, and a dated version of the line.

Is line planning the same as merchandise financial planning?

No. Merchandise financial planning sets the money: sales, margin and inventory by category and month, and from them the open-to-buy. Line planning works inside that budget and decides the product: how many options, at which price tiers, in which deliveries, with how much newness. The financial plan says what a category has to earn; line planning decides what the category will contain so that it can.

Is line planning the same as range planning?

Yes, in substance. Range planning is the term more common in the UK and Europe, and line planning the more common term in North America; both name the process of deciding a season’s product mix, counts, price architecture and phasing before the buy. The documents map the same way: a range plan is a line plan, a range review is a line review.